Lateefa Alwaalan, 2024 Lindas Award winner, on female entrepreneurship and Saudi Arabia’s future

Entrepreneurship is in Lateefa Alwaalan’s blood.

Her maternal great-grandmother was a successful, financially independent woman who owned and developed assets, highlighting a hidden history of female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia. Lateefa’s father, whom she credits as her greatest role model, was the first in the family to earn a college degree and spent his life building multiple businesses. 

With this illustrious heritage, Lateefa has gone on to make her own mark in family history — and Saudi Arabia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. A rare early female founder, she built Yatooq, the first Arabic-made coffee machine, before exiting the company in a private sale in 2019. From there, she became Managing Director of Endeavor Saudi Arabia. In 2020, she became the first woman appointed to the board of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce.

And in 2024, she won Endeavor’s own Lindas Award, our highest honor. Named after our co-founder and CEO, Linda Rottenberg, the Lindas celebrate entrepreneurs in emerging and underserved markets who embody Endeavor’s values at their highest. Award winners are nominated by their peers, mentors, board members, staff, and others and chosen by Endeavor’s Global Board.

It’s another achievement for a woman who grew up in a society that was very conservative & protective of women. Despite her early interest in business (“I remember [as a child] pretending to be a merchant, selling T-shirts or toys to others!”), Saudi Arabia’s legal and cultural context at the time made entrepreneurship a difficult path. At the time, women were not allowed to drive and jobs outside of the healthcare or educational sectors were rare. When women did start businesses, they tended to be within a certain field.

“Women owning beauty salons or working in fashion was very common,” Lateefa explains. “But if you wanted to build a B2B or tech business — that definitely was not the norm. I remember in 2011, when I went to register my company Yatooq, there was a law that said if you were a woman, you needed a man to be the official manager. Luckily, two or three months later this requirement was removed.”

Lateefa never planned to let cultural norms get in her way. She spent her teens and early 20s reading entrepreneur biographies and teaching herself to code, before going to the University of Washington for her MBA. 

“I did my undergrad in engineering, but during my MBA, I remember sitting in class and getting butterflies,” Lateefa recalls. “I used to feel that excitement like I was on a rollercoaster when I was literally in accounting and finance classes. And a few years after that, I started building Yatooq.”

Lateefa first encountered Endeavor during her days at Yatooq. “When I went through the International Selection Panel and saw the line-up of panelists I was going to meet, I was blown away,” she says. “These are people I follow on Twitter! Some of them were people who built the first online businesses globally. I was starstruck. Even just having the chance to talk about my company and get advice, regardless of the outcome, was a privilege.”

But Lateefa went beyond that chance, becoming an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2014. “I’d just hit the market and I was scaling my product. And for the next four years, Endeavor was very consistent in providing support and being proactive, asking, What do you need? The type of mentorship that I got access to through Endeavour would have taken me a long time to develop on my own. It was so impactful for me, because the life of an entrepreneur is hard, but you choose it because it’s fulfilling. And that’s why Endeavor has a special place in my heart.”

Now, Lateefa is part of a rapidly shifting industry. “A lot of the barriers women faced have been abolished and changed, structurally, culturally, legally,” she says. Women have equal pay and as of 2023, 31% of tech workers in Saudi Arabia are women — higher than in the EU and Silicon Valley. At Endeavor companies, the percentage of female engineers and tech workers is over 40%. At Yatooq’s factory, Lateefa remembers at one point that 90% of the workers were women.

“I designed it that way because I saw the social impact, but there’s business sense there, too,” Lateefa says. “This is access to talent that’s underserved. They’re hungry to work, they’re hungry to prove themselves. And [the change in Saudi Arabia] is something I’m super proud to see. I’m happy that my daughter is no longer limited in what she wants to be.”

Now as Managing Director at Endeavor Saudi Arabia, Lateefa continues to spread the Endeavor Multiplier Effect™, promoting entrepreneurial success not just in her individual achievements but in her impact on the entire entrepreneurial economy as she trains, mentors, and invests in the next generation.

It’s an exciting time in Saudi Arabia, with a new government program called Vision 2030 which aims to increase diversity economically, socially, and culturally. The challenge, from Lateefa’s perspective, is for the private sector to keep up with the fast change in the public sector.

“What’s happening in Riyadh or in Saudi has its ripple effects across the whole region,” says Lateefa. “And as we say at Endeavor, if he can do it, so can I. Celebrating success makes more people see that.”

Not for the first time, we’ll follow her lead.

Lindas Award Winners In Conversation

Lateefa joined her co-award winner Barry Napier, Irish CEO of Cubic Telecom, and Endeavor’s Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr for an intimate fireside chat at the Endeavor Gala in December 2024. Watch below as they discuss their common ground and the different pathways that brought them to Endeavor.